If the stock market these days is surging higher and higher, and if corporations near and far are reporting record-setting profits, why is the American middle class struggling to get by with less and less pay for more and more work? And why, in the years since the Great Recession first hit, does every facet of business and industry seem to have bounced back except for the American work force?

Tulsa’s Young Professionals Urbanist Crew will host its annual event—Street CReD—this Saturday.

It’s designed to highlight business and development opportunities in overlooked areas of town. The first event—two years ago—was in the Pearl District, followed last year by the Red Fork Main Street in West Tulsa.

This year the site will be 36th Street North and North Peoria.

Past Success

A house fire just north of I-244 in Tulsa injures an elderly woman. Flames were shooting from the home near Admiral Place and Yorktown when fire crews arrived early this morning. Troy Taylor lives just a couple of doors down. He says he alerted firefighters about a woman inside, and she was rescued.

Firefighters pulled the unconscious woman from the burning structure. She was taken to a hospital and at last report was in stable condition. A dog inside the house was killed in the blaze. The cause is under investigation. 

Instead of 'sticker shock', Tulsans found themselves in shock at the gasoline pump this morning. The price of regular unleaded gasoline increase a dime per-gallon overnight. Most stations are charging $3.49 for a gallon of regular unleaded.

The price shot-up as oil closed up on Thursday afternoon just above $96 per barrel. By comparison, Compressed Natural Gas is selling for 90-cents per GGE.

BRISTOW, Okla. (AP) — A hearing is slated to get underway for a northeast Oklahoma man accused of helping his late mother and others avoid prosecution for the disappearance and deaths of three females in 1992.

Grover Prewitt Jr., of Bristow, is expected to be arraigned Friday in Creek County. He's charged with being an accessory after the fact of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors say Prewitt sabotaged a pair of undercover surveillance attempts as investigators looked into the 21-year-old cold case.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A consultant hired by Oklahoma to help answer the question of how to insure people without health coverage says an existing program could provide the bedrock for a broader project.

Utah-based Leavitt Partners gave the Oklahoma Health Care Authority Board its preliminary report Thursday. The firm says Insure Oklahoma could be reworked and expanded to help almost 200,000 Oklahomans afford health insurance. Insure Oklahoma currently uses Medicaid money to help buy insurance for about 30,000 people.

Topping the local news:

• Not all Tulsa Councilors agree with the Mayor's proposal to fund public safety.
• Insure Oklahoma will have to be "reworked" to survive.
• Remember the Picher Tornado: Five years later.

As some of us know already, Oklahoma leads the nation, by a lamentably significant margin, in female incarcerations --- and two-thirds of the women in our state's prisons are actually there for non-violent offenses. Today, we hear about on-going efforts to combat this trend. On this edition of StudioTulsa on Health, Dr. John Schumann, our guest host, learns about Women in Recovery (or WIR), an outpatient incarceration-alternative for women facing long prison sentences for non-violent, drug-related offenses.

Picher, Oklahoma, today is a ghost town. Five years ago, it was a community is turmoil.

Abandoned mine shafts dot the landscape and piles of contaminated chat surround the town. The federal government was in the process of buying out the town's residents when an E-F 4 tornado leveled the community. Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of that tornado.

Tulsa Red Cross volunteer Linda Jones remembers rolling into the Ottawa County town in the Red Cross disaster van.